Friday, 4 June 2010

Scalextric Spring Term

So after Christmas the cars were yet to be finished and the commentary and racing was still to come. Here's how it happened.

First of all the clay models were vac-formed by the excellent Phil from Frankley City Learning Centre. When the plactic bodies came back we sprayed them white (with car spray) and the children painted them according to their chosen design.

The process of making the bodies took a few weeks, because it involved:

modelling with clay and allowing it to dry;

ferrying to and from Frankley City Learning Centre;

spray painting;

painting the sprayed cars.

Whilst all this was happening, the children began assembling the bodies. There were some excellent instructions provided by PTC on the scalextric4schools website here. The children attempted to follow them, allow they needed help with some things like pushing the cog and the wheels onto the axle using the vice. Also, I didn't allow the children to do any glueing, because the glue necessary to stick together the chassis was a little noxious. The children could follow some of the instructions better than I could because they had smaller fingers for threading the contacts onto the car. It was at this point that we could begin testing the cars only to discover that none of them would work at all unless you really pushed down hard on them. We tried everything - magnets, weights, even blue tack until we discovered that I'd directed the children to follow the instructions wrongly - we had put the contacts the wrong way round. The child who spotted this was most pleased with himself and we went on from there to get the chassis working and fix the bodies on to them.

Now, I have loads of pictures to show this process, but instead of taking ages to upload them I thought I'd put them on the video to show the approximate sequence of events.

With that all done the next thing to do was to get on with learning how to commentate and actually racing the cars. I'll get on with writing about that next time...